Teacher Handcuffs 6-Year-Old To Chair

Six-year-old Ja’Briel Weston was shackled by his ankle to a chair for disobeying his first-grade teacher. Two days later, he was apprehended by an armed security guard, dragged down a hallway and handcuffed to a chair for getting into a shoving match with another student. This didn’t happen at some medieval-age boarding school. It happened this year, this May, in New Orleans, at Sarah T. Reed Elementary School.

When Ja’Briel’s parents found out about this, his father, Sebastian Weston, met with the school’s principal, Daphyne Burnett, who not only confessed to the child cuffing but also said that she’d have it done again if the child got out of line. According to a legal complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, “When [Ja’Briel’s] father implored the school principal to stop these unconstitutional practices, she insisted that school policy required the arrests and seizures at the school.”